Kepler’s Laws, Newton’s formulas: grasping grand concepts from great teachers is the online luxury of this learn node. Rice University’s Galileo Project provides the Johannes Kepler biography. NASA spins in an overview for science teachers of Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion. The image with this post is from a Syracuse University Physics applet that animates Kepler’s Laws.
A class video lecture is provided of Ramamurti Shankar, the John Randolph Huffman Professor of Physics and Professor of Applied Physics at Yale. From from a course in the Fundamentals of Physics, the lecture on Kepler’s Laws covers these ideas: “The focus of the lecture is problems of gravitational interaction. The three laws of Kepler are stated and explained. Planetary motion is discussed in general, and how this motion applies to the planets moving around the Sun in particular.”
To begin to learn how hearing and balance work a good introduction is an online overview from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. The overview begins:
Hearing is one of the five senses. It is a complex process of picking up sound and attaching meaning to it. The human ear is fully developed at birth and responds to sounds that are very faint as well as sounds that are very loud. Even in utero, infants respond to sound. The ability to hear is critical to the attachment of meaning to the world around us.
The ASHA webpage then explains the functions of the five sections of the hearing mechanism: 1. Outer ear, 2. Middle ear, 3. Inner ear, 4. Acoustic nerve, and 5. Brain’ s auditory processing centers.
Much more about hearing can be learned in the Open University’s Science and Nature materials about Hearing. The illustration with this learn node is from those Open University materials in the section about neural processing of auditory information. To get into even more minute details, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States have an in-depth article on how visual speech speeds up the neural processing of auditory speech. Together these resources, and the links they in turn provide, are a starting learn node for many related hearing subjects.
Thomas Jefferson got his ideas most certainly in part from his own genius. But that genius was fed by being an avid reader. The Internet opens Jefferson’s ideas and his reading globally. The image of his books shown here is from the Thomas Jefferson Library online exhibition at the Library of Congress website. The Library at Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia home, provides more of his reading and thinking. To learn from a scholar of how Jefferson built his ideas on the shoulders of giants, you can sit in on a lecture by Yale University’s Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science Steven B. Smith. Videotaped from a course on Introduction to Political Philosophy the lecture describes the influence of Locke and other political thinkers on Thomas Jefferson:
John Locke had such a profound influence on Thomas Jefferson that he may be deemed an honorary founding father of the United States. He advocated the natural equality of human beings, their natural rights to life, liberty, and property, and defined legitimate government in terms that Jefferson would later use in the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s life and works are discussed, and the lecture shows how he transformed ideas previously formulated by Machiavelli and Hobbes into a more liberal constitutional theory of the state.
Sprinkler irrigation coverage is illustrated in the image here that comes from Lecture 3 in a course in the Biological and Irrigation Engineering department at Utah State University. Agricultural students anywhere across the world can learn water handling and conservation from the Utah State lectures. IrrigationTutorials.com is a website with a broad range of tutorials on the practicalities of selecting and installing irrigation systems. Extensive details of sprinkler irrigation are provided by the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in a website section on factors to consider in selecting a farm Irrigation system. Websites about irrigation are interconnected richly, making one of humankind’s most ancient technologies a click or two away from anyone with Net access who wants to understand and implement irrigation.
If you have been wondering just how dangerous it is to break one of the new energy-saving light bulbs, click to play this video to find out. As it has recently been opening more of its content online, the Wall Street Journal is becoming a valuable resource for learning content. The above video is an example. Students interested in the health an safety implications from the video can flip on some outstanding expertise from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health course materials. An introductory lecture includes this definition of Industrial Hygiene:
Science and art devoted to the anticipation, recognition, evaluation, and control of those workplace environmental factors which may cause sickness, impaired health and well-being, or significant discomfort and inefficiency among workers or among citizens of the community.
If you have time to listen to the complete brief video, you will get a preview on LED lighting, which this expert predicts as the future of lighting. You can also copy the code by clicking the icon on the video, and embed it in teaching, learning or other bright idea online locations.
In this learn node focusing on mountain gorillas, good news is an important bottom line. The website of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project reports the good news that the gorillas’ numbers have grown from 248 to over 360 individuals in the Virunga Massif in Rwanda alone. The illustration for this learn node is from the veterinary project, showing one of its patients: Magayane, a 6.5-year-old female mountain gorilla who was found to have a wire snare her left hand. The project team operated successfully to remove the snare and gave her a complete physical exam while she was under the anesthesia.
Anyone across the world can study and learn about Primate Medicine at the OpenCourseware published online by Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. The course materials are an excellent introduction to non-human primate medicine. The Primate Medicine webpage is also important reading for anyone who has thought about having a monkey as a pet: powerful reasons for not doing so are explained.
The Wildlife Conservation Society provides a Mountain Gorilla webpage describing the status of these great apes, discovered only 100 years ago by western science: “While mountain gorillas remain highly endangered, thier resurgence stands as a powerful example of what committed conservation efforts can accomplish.”
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” Coooool site. I never thought of music this way…” wrote Brian, a gifted, highly trained musician, when he sent me links that sparked this learn node from the work at Princeton by Dmitri Tymoczko. The illustration to the right is 2 frames from a Tymoczko animation of chords in four-dimensional space.
An article in Science about The Geometry of Musical Chords begins with this abstract:
A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold. Line segments represent mappings from the notes of one chord to those of another. Composers in a wide range of styles have exploited the non-Euclidean geometry of these spaces, typically by using short line segments between structurally similar chords. Such line segments exist only when chords are nearly symmetrical under translation, reflection, or permutation. Paradigmatically consonant and dissonant chords possess different near-symmetries and suggest different musical uses.
The article is by Dmitri Tymoczko who illustrates ChordGeometries on animations with sounds on his Web pages at Princeton University. He invites you to: “Watch as Chopin moves around in a circle, a Mobius strip, and in four-dimensional space! Or try Deep Purple on a Mobius strip!”
For some background to the topic, an introduction to Form in Music by Catherine Schmidt-Jones is available in Rice University’s Connexions. Anthony Brandt, also in Connexions, gives an overview of Musical Form, with examples from Schumann, Bach, Boulez, and Beethoven.
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Here as this learn node begins are links to two of the many superb music modules on Connexions by Catherine Schmidt-Jones:
One is about Ragtime.
The other is about the great Ragtime artist Scott Joplin.
Scott Joplin and Ragtime are booming at The Scott Joplin International Ragtime Foundation, where the biography page about Scott Joplin includes the piano-player illustration shown here. Moving on through this virtual Ragtime online network, an invitation to the annual Scott Joplin Ragtime Festival (every June) takes us to Sedalia, Missouri.
On a visit to Sedalia’s Web site for a look at its music history, it is easy to get sidetracked into its rich railroad history, as this Katy engine image from the Sedalia site recalls. It seems certain Scott Joplin often passed through the now restored Katy Depot — and perhaps there was a piano in the waiting room where ragtime was played in his hey day.
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The triangle of information shown in this learn node is a phase diagram thermodynamic calculation for solder Bi-Pb-Sn. So who care about something like that? In the advancing complexity of metallurgy, depth of detail is important. This is the explanation of the NIST host of the diagram, whose Web site explains the mission:
The NIST Metallurgy Division is working closely with materials suppliers and users to develop the measurement and standards infrastructure needed in diverse technological areas - from steelmaking to the fabrication of nanostructured multilayers for magnetic recording heads. . . .
Learning about solder might seem more likely to involve technique, like that offered in the PDF which contains the illustration of “Tinning the soldering iron” from About Soldering—making Clip Leads—CLK from MIT’s Open Courseware. A sample of third sort of soldering knowledge available online is this popular Soldering Guide, a tutorial supported by Google ads.
Within the open Internet, patterns of related ideas for the subject of solder can be an amalgam from diverse sources.
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Learn node topic: African American Great Migration. “From 1860-1920, the number of people living in towns of 8000 or more grew from 6 million to 54 million, with immigrants from Europe and rural migrants from the U.S. forming the bulk of newcomers.” We learn this from a Notre Dame African American history lecture on The Migration. A lecture on The Great Migration: Blacks in White America from the University of Wisconsin adds:
Blacks turned to the “Promised Land” of the North in search of jobs and greater racial toleration. However, such basic demands fueled increasing debate over the place of blacks in predominantly white America in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Nebraska Department of Education and Nebraska State Historical Society tell in detail of the period’s corruption and racial violence in Omaha. Along with the image show with this post of soldiers on guard in Omaha, others from the Nebraska article include a photograph of the burning of Will Brown’s body, Omaha, Nebraska, Sept. 28, 1919. The Library of Congress collection in its African-American Mosaic includes Chicago as a destination for the Great Migration. Digital History provides another overview of The Great Migration in the 1920s period and The Jazz Age.
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